This photo taken on July 28, 2025 shows a view of China Changan Automobile Group’s digital and intelligent factory for the new energy vehicle AVATR in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality. Photo: Xinhua
China’s industrial sector has shown notable signs of continued recovery with profits reversing a downward trend to grow by 0.9 percent year-on-year in the first eight months of 2025, thanks to stepped-up macro-policies, the deepened building of a unified national market and a low base effect from the same period last year, official data showed on Saturday.
The combined profit of major industrial enterprises reached 4.69 trillion yuan ($657.8 billion) in the January-August period, up 0.9 percent year-on-year, compared with a decrease of 1.7 percent year-on-year in the January-July period, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said in a statement.
The latest data reversed a continuous year-on-year decline in industrial enterprises’ accumulative profits since May, NBS statistician Yu Weining noted, highlighting strong support from the equipment manufacturing sector and improvement in industrial profits across enterprises of different sizes.
The equipment manufacturing sector played the role of a ‘ballast stone,” Yu said. In the first eight months, profits in above-scale equipment manufacturing enterprises grew by 7.2 percent year-on-year, contributing 2.5 percentage points to the overall profit growth of all above-scale industrial enterprises, making it one of the most significant driving sectors for industrial profit recovery. Among the eight sub-sectors within equipment manufacturing, significant gains are made in railways, shipbuilding, aerospace and electronics.
Over the period, profits of raw material manufacturing sector grew by 22.1 percent year-on-year, accelerating by 10 percentage points compared to January-July, and contributing 2.5 percentage points to the overall profit growth of all above-scale industrial enterprises, according to the NBS.
In addition, profits of consumer goods manufacturing reversed a 2.2 percent decline in January-July to post 1.4 percent growth in January-August, data showed.
It’s worth noting that industrial enterprises of all sizes saw improved profitability, with private enterprises demonstrating particularly notable acceleration, Yu said.
Looking ahead, against the backdrop of severe and complex external environment and insufficient domestic market demand, efforts will continue to be made to further expand domestic demand, deepen the building of a unified national market, standardize corporate competition, and create more favorable conditions for sustained recovery of industrial enterprise profits, Yu said.